When trying to think of a name for our look at Asus’s new Z87 mainstream motherboard options I went through countless bad jokes and Bond Goldmember comments. I came to the conclusion that much like Asus I would let the boards speak for themselves. Today we are going to take a look at the Asus Z87 Pro and Z87 Plus, both what they call Channel boards. In other words this is Asus’s standard lineup. In the past I have been extremely impressed with what Asus had to offer in their standard lineup; hopefully they can keep that up. Let’s see what they have to offer.

You people do realize that you're supposed to be looking at your monitor, to see what this motherboard actually does, don't you?
If all you want is a play pretty then go and buy yourselves some cat toys at your local PetsMart.
Did the reviewer actually try and overclock these motherboards or just leave them at a very common, and slow, 4.5GHz.?
Did the heatsinks actually work or were the chips running too hot and needed some liquid cooling?
Same with the cpu's. Is liquid cooling demanded or can the users just stick with cooling on air or some everyday closed liquid cooler instead of a complete custom loop?
Did you actually push these motherboards to their limits or stick with stock settings?
Will you ever do a proper review or just leave it as almost a word for word description by ASUS?
Finally, ASUS, since people here seem to only judge a computer motherboard by color (of all things!), then why not make them all a basic and totally black color scheme?
Since most people are too stupid to understand a common "beep code", then why not make a breakout LED panel that can be mounted in an external 5.25" bay and then these users can start using a solid door, instead of one that has a window, and then they can just ignore your color schema and get back to operating a computer. Instead of just sitting there and staring at their motherboards like a bunch of slack-jawed idiots?

You people do realize that you're supposed to be looking at your monitor, to see what this motherboard actually does, don't you?
If all you want is a play pretty then go and buy yourselves some cat toys at your local PetsMart.

I guess you don't know what case mods are. Let me inform you.

Case modification (commonly referred to as case modding where an individual project is referred to as a case mod) is the modification of a computer chassis (often just referred to as the case), or a video game console chassis. Modifying a computer case in any non-standard way is considered a case mod. Modding is done, particularly by hardware enthusiasts, to show off a computer's apparent power by showing off the internal hardware, and also to make it look aesthetically pleasing to the owner.

I'm happy to answer any questions you have, and you are welcome to hate on my review all you would like. But we do ask that in the future you treat both our contributors and community members with the same respect that we will give you.kzinti1 wrote:

Did the reviewer actually try and overclock these motherboards or just leave them at a very common, and slow, 4.5GHz.?

As the review pointed out, being a motherboard review not a CPU review we wanted to focus on things that are motherboard dependent, not CPU dependent. Haswell has its CPU voltage regulation on the CPU itself. This means that you are going to see similar overclock results from board to board. Not only that but the results from our engineering sample most likely won't be the same as what you see with a retail CPU. So we focused on overclocking results that would vary from board to board, the auto overclocking results.

kzinti1 wrote:

Did the heatsinks actually work or were the chips running too hot and needed some liquid cooling?

Liquid cooling is never really needed on a motherboard but with Haswell voltage regulation being on the CPU the cooling on the Pro board is a lot more than is actually needed. I pointed this out IN the review.kzinti1 wrote:

Did you actually push these motherboards to their limits or stick with stock settings?

This goes back to what was mentioned beforekzinti1 wrote:

Same with the cpu's. Is liquid cooling demanded or can the users just stick with cooling on air or some everyday closed liquid cooler instead of a complete custom loop?

This is a motherboard review, not a CPU review. But to answer your question, all of our testing was done with air cooling (as you would see if you read the review). Water cooling isn't needed and the difference in performance between air cooling and closed loop water cooling is minimal in most cases.kzinti1 wrote:

Finally, ASUS, since people here seem to only judge a computer motherboard by color (of all things!), then why not make them all a basic and totally black color scheme?
Since most people are too stupid to understand a common "beep code", then why not make a breakout LED panel that can be mounted in an external 5.25" bay and then these users can start using a solid door, instead of one that has a window, and then they can just ignore your color schema and get back to operating a computer. Instead of just sitting there and staring at their motherboards like a bunch of slack-jawed idiots?

Some people want a window in their case. If you think the only reason they put windows in cases is to see the diagnostic LED you are sorely mistaken. The same goes for the color scheme, some people pick their motherboards to match a look that they are going for in their case along with its features.

You people do realize that you're supposed to be looking at your monitor, to see what this motherboard actually does, don't you?
If all you want is a play pretty then go and buy yourselves some cat toys at your local PetsMart.
Did the reviewer actually try and overclock these motherboards or just leave them at a very common, and slow, 4.5GHz.?
Did the heatsinks actually work or were the chips running too hot and needed some liquid cooling?
Same with the cpu's. Is liquid cooling demanded or can the users just stick with cooling on air or some everyday closed liquid cooler instead of a complete custom loop?
Did you actually push these motherboards to their limits or stick with stock settings?
Will you ever do a proper review or just leave it as almost a word for word description by ASUS?
Finally, ASUS, since people here seem to only judge a computer motherboard by color (of all things!), then why not make them all a basic and totally black color scheme?
Since most people are too stupid to understand a common "beep code", then why not make a breakout LED panel that can be mounted in an external 5.25" bay and then these users can start using a solid door, instead of one that has a window, and then they can just ignore your color schema and get back to operating a computer. Instead of just sitting there and staring at their motherboards like a bunch of slack-jawed idiots?